As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Friday, 31 March 2017

Mike Addison A METICULOUS project to identify and catalogue every single specimen of bird at a South Lakeland museum has been completed after almost 10 years. All 1,681 specimens of the impressive bird collection at the World Wildlife Gallery in Kendal Museum have been catalogued for the first time with help from Museum and Gallery Skills students, staff and volunteers. The work has highlighted the existence of some extremely rare, critically endangered and extinct birds from all over the world in a collection that boasts 717 different species. Much of the collection dates from the 19th century and Kendal Museum is now working to refurbish the gallery to make it possible for every single specimen to be on public display. “This is really quite a remarkable feat," said museum curator Carol Davies. "It’s been 10 years of work and now we’ve got this incredible scientific record at the museum, which is unique in the UK.

Thursday, 30 March 2017

THEY may have almost been extinct but Yellow Chats are making a come back. Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service operations support manager Mark Read said the Yellow Chat's population growth had tripled in five years on Curtis Island. "The bird has been listed as endangered on national level, so it's a bird under a lot of pressure," Mr Read said.

With nine birds left on Curtis Island in 2011, the number had grown to 35 as of last year. "Once we removed grazing pressure and the damage of feral pigs, we've seen a bounce back of the marine plains and population recovery of Yellow Chats," Mr Read said. "It's a great success story." As a wildlife biologist by trade, Mr Read said the habitat combination Yellow Chats live in, is quite unique and they only live in a few spots across the county. "Curtis Island has got that unique combination of habitat these birds are specific to ... which is essentially marine plains," he said.

Calla Wahlquist March 24, 2017 00:00 IST Updated: March 24, 2017 04:21 IST The discovery was made by a group of friends determined to spot the bird thought to be extinct A night parrot has been photographed in Western Australia, adding another twist to the mysterious history of the species that was presumed extinct until it was rediscovered in Queensland four years ago .It is the first verified sighting of the bird in WA for almost 100 years and follows a history of unverified sightings, disbelieved reports and futile ecological surveys that rivals the hunt for the (presumably still) extinct Thylacine in Tasmania.The discovery was made by a group of four friends from Broome who have dedicated the better part of seven years to locating the bird, examining detailed maps, trekking into likely habitats, and spending evenings in the state’s arid interior listening for unusual bird calls.“The calls to us were unfamiliar,” one of the group, Bruce Greatwich, said. “We are quite experienced in these habitats so to hear something new was quite exciting.”The calls were different to those recorded in the Queensland night parrot population, described by researchers in 2005 as “a ‘ding-ding’ call similar to that of a bell miner” followed by “a short frog-like ‘grieet’,” but were enough to indicate the bird might be present.The next morning a night parrot darted out in front of one of the group, George Swann, while he was walking through spinifex looking for entirely different birds.It was green and yellow with black barred feathers. The common description is of a big, dumpy budgerigar, about the same size as a rainbow lorikeet.Cameras at the ready“We were able to go down and re-find it and we had our cameras at the ready to get a photo,” Mr. Greatwich said.Ordinarily, he added, they would never disturb a nocturnal bird in the daytime, “but in this instance we knew we had to get a photo”.Continued

Wednesday, 29 March 2017

Birds benefit from flocking together -- even when they're not of a feather. According to a new study in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, China's endangered Crested Ibises benefit from joining forces with other, more visually-oriented bird species while searching for food.

Joining mixed-species flocks can reduce birds' risk of predation while boosting their foraging opportunities, but it can also expose them to competition and disease, and little research has been done on what this means for birds such as ibises that rely on their sense of touch to find food. Yuanxing Ye and Changqing Ding of the Beijing Forestry University and their colleagues studied the behavior of Crested Ibises foraging with and without Little Egrets in central China's Shaanxi Province, recording the birds' behavior with a digital video camera to determine whether they picked up on social cues from the other species. They found that ibises in mixed-species flocks became alert to threats sooner, suggesting they felt less at risk when mingling with the more visually-oriented egrets.

Date: March 27, 2017Source: Office of Naval ResearchResembling a feathered flying ace with his miniature protective goggles and chinstrap, the parrotlet named Obie stood ready to take off. On signal, Obie propelled into the air, flapped through a laser field infused with microparticles and landed on another perch three feet away.

The journey only lasted three seconds, but it challenged the accuracy of three aerodynamics models long used to predict animal flight. It also might impact future designs of bio-inspired drones, robots and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a topic of interest to the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.

Sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), researchers at Stanford University found a new way to precisely measure the vortices -- circular patterns of rotating air -- created by birds' wings during flight. The results shed greater light on how these creatures produce enough lift to fly.

Monday, 27 March 2017

In a new paper published in National Science Review, a team of scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature, and the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology (all in China) described the most exceptionally preserved fossil bird discovered to date. The new specimen from the rich Early Cretaceous Jehol Biota (approximately 131 to 120 million years old) is referred to as Eoconfuciusornis, the oldest and most primitive member of the Confuciusornithiformes, a group of early birds characterized by the first occurrence of an avian beak. Its younger relative Confuciusornis is known from thousands of specimens but this is only the second specimen of Eoconfuciusornis found. This species comes only from the 130.7 Ma Huajiying Formation deposits in Hebei, which preserves the second oldest known fossil birds. Birds from this layer are very rare. This new specimen of Eoconfuciusornis, housed in the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature, in Eastern China, is a female. The ovary reveals developing yolks that vary in size, similar to living birds. This suggests that confuciusornithiforms evolved a period of rapid yolk deposition prior to egg-laying (crocodilians, which are archosaurs like birds, deposit yolks slowly in all eggs for months with no period of rapid yolk formation), which is indicative of complex energetic profiles similar to those observed in birds. This means Eoconfuciusornis and its kin, like living birds, was able to cope with extremely high metabolic demands during early growth and reproduction (whereas energetic demands in crocodiles are even, lacking complexity). In contrast, other Cretaceous birds including the more advanced group the Enantiornithes appear to have lower metabolic rates and have required less energy similar to crocodilians and non-avian dinosaurs (their developing yolks show little size disparity indicating no strong peak in energy associated with reproduction, and much simpler energetic profiles, limited by simpler physiologies).Read more at:

Over 800,000 songbirds, such as
blackcaps and robins, are estimated to have been illegally killed on a British
military base in Cyprus last autumn, where illegal trapping activity remains
around its highest ever levels, according to a new report.

New research by the RSPB and
BirdLife Cyprus shows that the number of nets used to trap birds remains around
record levels on British Territory, with an increase of 183% since the
illegal-killing monitoring programme began in 2002.

The songbirds are illegally
trapped and killed to provide restaurants with the main ingredient for the
local and expensive delicacy of ambelopoulia- a plate of cooked songbirds.
Organised crime gangs are driving this illegal activity on a huge scale and it
is estimated they earn millions of Euros every year from the songbirds they
kill on British territory.

Between August and October 2016
the small British Sovereign Base Area (SBA) police force, supported by
specialist surveillance help from RSPB Investigations staff, opened more cases
and confiscated more mist nets - long lines of near invisible netting - than
ever previously recorded. However, the SBA Administration were largely forced
to abandon their most successful tool against this criminal activity- removal
of the invasive Australian acacia trees which trappers have planted on MoD land
in order to lure the birds in- due to the trappers organising large protests
and a dramatic blockade. Whereas the Base authorities had successfully removed
54 acres of acacia in the preceding two years, this autumn they were only able
to remove a further 7 acres, leaving around 90 acres of this illegal-killing
infrastructure still standing on the British firing range.

Trappers also blatantly and
extensively deploy electronic calling devices on the firing range at night in
order to lure in birds to their deaths and there are concerns that parts of the
British firing range are effectively becoming a no-go area for the committed
but significantly outnumbered local police force.

Martin Harper, RSPB Conservation
Director, said: “This report sadly highlights that the British base is the
number one bird killing hotspot on the whole island of Cyprus. “Many much loved
garden bird species are being trapped and killed for huge profit by criminal
gangs. The trappers’ brazen prevention of the removal of their criminal
infrastructure from MoD land could never be tolerated here in the UK. The UK
Government must therefore provide enforcement support to help the Base
authorities respond to the trappers and safely remove the remaining 90 acres of
acacia so that they cannot be used to kill hundreds of thousands more birds.”

The report estimates that over
1.7 million birds could have been killed within the survey area, which covers
both the British base and Cyprus Republic areas, and nearly 2.3 million across
the whole of Cyprus due to this extensive bird trapping activity. This
industrial scale activity has also been confirmed in a scientific paper,
published last year, where Cyprus was identified as one of the worst places for
illegal bird killing in the Mediterranean.